Jesus our perfect Savior!
Written by Heidi & Rolland Baker
South Sudan
WE ARE IN AFRICA among the poorest of the poor because we love seeing what our perfect Savior can do! For example, here’s Elaina, a fifteen-year-old when she was brought to our Iris base in Yei, Sudan, by the UN. She escaped to the Sudanese border after she had been abducted and brutalized by the LRA in the jungles of DRCongo. She was tortured, saw people killed in front of her and was left for days tied to trees. When she arrived she could barely sit up, had no use of either hand, scars all over her body and a faraway look of fear and pain in her eyes.
I was with Michele Perry and the rest of our Iris family in Yei right after Elaina came. A few days later we caught her relaxed and happy, laughing with her new friends around her. Two months later she was back with her family in Aba, DRCongo, healed and restored in Jesus with nearly full strength back in her hands. One by one we keep seeing victims of Satan’s cruelty brought back to life, healed inside and out, a picture of the joy of Jesus. If there is hope in Jesus for Elaina, there is hope for anyone, anywhere!
Jesus has been busy in Yei, as He has been everywhere in our Iris world. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses! Around the time of my last visit to Yei our Iris Revival School students reported in a few days this sampling:
VISITATION: Two of our students went to visit one of our neighbors, a catholic man. Everyone in his family was seriously sick. God gave him a dream the night before that two men would come to pray and he saw Jesus coming with them. Next day our students turn up. The man is beside himself that strangers would come and pray when his church would not. Everyone was healed.
PRISON: The officials have been asking for prayer too. Our team prayed over each room because of evil tormenting spirits and the demons left. Many prisoners came forward to be released from the pains in their bodies. When they chose forgiveness these pains left. Prayed for one man who was in pain all over his body. He had been in prison for 6 years falsely accused he says. The moment he chose to forgive his accuser the pain left with prayer.
HOSPITAL: God is healing so many people, the hospital which was full the last 3-4 weeks is now almost empty. There were very few sick people left to pray for. The nurses have been thanking our teams and asking not only for prayer but for teaching to learn how to pray for their patients!
HOSPITAL: There was a little 10-year-old girl stabbed in the back of the brain by a SPLA bayonet. Her whole body was seizing violently, eyes rolled back in her head, screaming in pain and the team prayed peace. She grew still immediately. John Sebit took the witchcraft charms from her mother and the girl began to scream again. John got face to face with her and told her to repeat a prayer of choosing Jesus after him. SHE DID! Stabbed in the brain and then suddenly lucid and able to focus and pray out loud. She is resting well.
HOSPITAL: One woman was laying lifeless in the wards on the floor. She wanted to die and took poison that left her blind, deaf, mute and unable to talk or walk. He stops with the team and prays for her. Then they move on to pray for a few more cases. On his way out of the ward, he runs into her: seeing, walking, hearing, she introduces herself as Rose.
HOSPITAL: One young boy had recently returned with his family from Khartoum in fear of the referendum. He fell out of a tree he was climbing and was left paralyzed and in pain, his legs twisted beneath him. Our students pray for him — his pain leaves, his legs straighten. They stand him up and he walks!
POLICE TRAINING: About a month ago we took notice of about 500 police officers in training just near to our compound. It turns out they are coming from all over our state. One of our team members was heavily burdened for them and began to pray. One day we were driving by and there was an overwhelming sense to stop. So we did and one of our key leaders, John jumped out and went and met the lead commander. He basically said, where have you been? We have needed someone to tell us what to do with all the demonic attacks. They invited us to come back and share with all of the students. So we took our our Revival School team and preached there. 495 of the 500 decided to follow Jesus, and we will be baptizing them all in our local, all-purpose community pond!
More photos of Sudan in gallery
Somalia/northern Kenya/North Africa
CNN states that 750,000 Somalians are in imminent danger of dying of starvation, and that may just be the beginning. Although the horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years, the worst culprit is politics. Again, our fundamental problem in this world is not poverty and disease, but sin. And Jesus is the only answer for that! But we are His Body, and we need to show what He is like through our faith and real, practical, bodily help. Our overall Iris vision in our part of the world is focused on North Africa and the wildfire spread of revival from southern Africa all the way up through the north and on to Jerusalem… The obstacles seem unimaginable, but it’s a thrill to do the impossible in His Name! We have been getting used to it all these years!
One of our Iris core values has always been to concentrate on “the least of these,” the poorest of the poor, the most desperate and unlikely in all the world to experience anything good. Here our perfect Savior loves to display His matchless grace and power. Mozambique was our beginning in Africa, and will continue to be the object of Heidi’s and my greatest attention. But as Iris grows and Jesus adds workers for the harvest, we pray for fruit throughout North Africa. Our cutting edge frontiers are now in South Sudan and DRCongo, spreading to northern Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia. May Jesus flood us with carriers of His glory to meet the challenge of destroying the works of the enemy among these millions… Actually, the country in Africa that now has by far the greatest number of undernourished people is DRCongo, in spite of its lushness and riches. Again the chief, underlying issue is rampant sin.
We dare to be exhilarated in spite all the horror before us in the world news because we remain convinced that we have a perfect Savior in whom we can put all our faith. We are of no use if we feel crushed and discouraged. Our theology must remain intact and true. Our power is in the Cross of Jesus and nowhere else. And so we invade the darkness with the Word of the Lord and blood of the Lamb.
Iris has sent relief teams to Haiti and Japan, and to facilitate many more efforts we are organizing Iris Relief, a subsidiary of Iris, which we now call IrisGlobal, our worldwide parent organization. For more information, please contact Yonnie Cheng at yonnie@irisrelief.org and visit http://irisrelief.org.
Mozambique
Our people movement is concentrated in Mozambique, and here we have already seen more of the power of God than we ever dreamed we would in this life. We have received more than we could have asked or thought. But yet Jesus keeps flooding us with more, and there is no limit! God pours out His Spirit without measure! And so we press on to what lies ahead…
This baby boy, blind from birth with eyes white and clouded over, was healed in a flash before many hundreds of Mozambicans, missions school students and visitors. This took place in a cement floor, tin roof Iris church in Mieze, near Pemba, where we now have a thriving community of believers who, in their mud huts, have been experiencing a stream of healing miracles these past few years. There we have a school, a children’s home and a church bursting with Africans thrilled with their perfect Savior! This is a resting place for the Holy Spirit, who loves to show up there with great power and joy!
Our bases in Pemba keep growing, hosting a community church for thousands, a Bible school, a missions school, a children’s center, a primary school and housing for hundreds of missionaries, students, staff and visitors. We are inundated with foreigners from dozens of countries, which is just what the Holy Spirit ordered, and hearts from around the world are being shaped for ministry to the poor. We are in a Kingdom vortex of supernatural activity, a sovereign work of God that sweeps us along in refreshing wonder and awe.
Of course we are also tested and refined to the uttermost. Wherever God is active there are responses and reactions of all kinds, and some fail the test and fall by the wayside. Spiritually we are deep in enemy territory, sustaining injuries and casualties, and keep getting threatened with our ministry’s annihilation. But our demise is greatly exaggerated, and we move from glory to glory as we learn through our hardships to trust God, who raises the dead (2 Cor. 1:8-11).
The dead are still raised, the lost are still saved, the hungry are fed, the lonely are in families, the simple are taught, the poor and hopeless dream dreams, and love, peace and joy increasingly reign. All this is His workmanship, and He is able to finish what He began. He is perfect, and will perfect us!
Our Bible school for bush pastors remains a joy to us. Our students come to us for three months out of every year for three or four years, and by then they are truly immersed both in the Word and the Spirit. And then we have our fifth-year students, whom we call our “MMs” — Mozambican missionaries! These are humble, mature, solid, fervent carriers of the Gospel, God’s answer for this country, and their testimonies are a thrill to hear. Joy, visitations, healings, salvations, transformations of all kinds flow from them. We are so proud of them; they should be teaching our foreigners, including us! Here is one of our heroes, Pastor Adriano, who has been used along with many others to raise the dead.
Our school of missions in Pemba, called Harvest School, runs twice a year for ten weeks at a time, and each time results in an intensely close, joyful, filled-up, free and released family of potential missionaries eager to lay their lives down for love. We pray for power to accommodate and respond to all the interest and hunger coming from around the world. The place to learn missions is on the mission field, where every day we can put into practice what Jesus puts in our hearts. May He call many from this rich pool of lives to help us finish the task Jesus has given us of testifying to the gospel of God’s grace in the neediest places we can find around the world.
Thank you!
With all our special relief and development projects going on, we need to express our great debt of love to all of you who support our massive regular commitments to feed, house and minister to thousands in our African family already under our care. We have huge monthly budgets at all our main bases, and it is absolutely and amazingly supernatural that so many around the world are sensitive and generous enough to keep us going financially. We love and bless you, and are glad for all that will accrue to your account in the Lord!
We are also intensely grateful for so many of you who have taken on the ministry of intercession for us as we face many serious spiritual confrontations, crises and physical challenges. We know that the fruitfulness of our ministry is in answer to the love, faith and prayers of our Iris family around the world. Truly we are a family, not a business, management exercise or political campaign! May you be richly, overwhelmingly blessed in return! Stay close! More soon…
Much, much love in Jesus,
Rolland and Heidi
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